Importing data from city of Kamloops

I asked the GIS coordinator of the City of Kamloops if I could use their GIS data that they freely provide in OpenStreetMap. He said it was okay, so I’ve uploaded some of it so far. I’ve only uploaded a few blocks of buildings, park boundaries and tree points for part of the city. There are many other shapefiles that they have available such as parcels, addresses, pipes, water, trails, bus routes, etc. I have tools available to convert from Shapfile to OSM format.

Please comment on whether this is okay, and if so if anyone wants to help. I’ve coded the source = “City of Kamloops”

http://webserver.kamloops.ca/imf/sites/DataDownload/disclaimer.html

There is a growing resistance to any imports in OSM because of a belief that it hurts the community - this is a good discussion: http://sotm-eu.org/talk?57 . That being said, if the local mappers agree that they want some of this data and care is taken to convert the data to high OSM quality standards, then go ahead.

Examples that I think would be good candidates - park boundaries (hard and possibly dangerous to get exact boundaries by survey, but first hand surveys fill inner park details), buildings - more accurate than aerial traces, water and trails - if you wish to continue to correct and enhance based on surveys. Addresses - probably if they have good positional accuracy; will make Nominatum functional for finding addresses.

Possible bad candidates - Parcels - probably not; go out of date too quickly, they clutter the map because editors don’t handle them well, they don’t add value to today’s typical map application. . Pipelines - probably not for the same reason. An external renderer wanting to show this sort of data could combine it directly from the latest public data at rendering time.

Also see the Import guidelines: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Import/Guidelines
Particularly the bit about discussing it with local mappers first. And documenting it on the wiki.

Also re the licensing, exactly what sort of agreement have you got? Are they happy that the data may be modified in OSM, or used for a variety of purposes, including commercial use? And are they expecting any sort of attribution?

@mattropolis:

when your datasource is very legal to import and there are no reasons to benefit from because of the points that MikeN and Vclaw said, you can also make an entry at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potential_Datasources

… and you can give us some http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Permalink on areas where you or others have put in that data, to check its quality.

I think imports are great, if they’re handled correctly. In other words a blind mass import is always a bad idea, however a careful, thought out merging of data is always of great benefit. Read the guidelines Vclaw mentioned, and definitely send a message to the imports@ and talk-ca@ lists. Also check for active mappers in your area and send them a message to inform and/or invite them. Local mappers and those on the list can help you decide what data is worth importing, both in terms of relevance and data quality. But remember, merging with existing OSM data will be the biggest challenge!

Also, from my reading of their terms of use (which is just a pretty standard disclaimer), there are no issues with using this data from a legal perspective.

I’ve made a couple contacts with mappers in the area. I’m going to clean up some of tags that were in upper case, and some of the tags aren’t important to OSM in the data I already added. We will work together to discuss plans to improve the map in the Kamloops area. Thanks for your feedback.